Editorial: It is a pity that it is too late for TUV to cut its links with Reform after Nigel Farage cruelly betrayed the agreement with Jim Allister

Morning View

​Well, well, well. Last week we said that Nigel Farage was an unreliable friend of unionists.​

The Reform UK leader did prove he is unreliable yesterday, jumping from one unionist group to another.

Unionists have been divided on the political way forward amid a declining vote, and a party that wants to wreck NI but must always be in power, Sinn Fein.

The three-way division is unsustainable, and ought to be replaced by two movements: one moderate, one more robust. There are many reasons for the split: one is that the Ulster Unionists remember how the DUP over decades tried to outwit and ultimately demolish them, which hardly makes co-operation easy. The TUV says there must be opposition if the largest unionist party is going to say it got rid of something so fundamental as the increasingly visible Irish Sea border. Not only this, but for all the talk of splits in the party it went back to Stormont and an IRA apologist first minister, with barely a whisper of dissent, apart from a few Westminster politicians who directed their fire entirely at the government - as if the DUP did not do the deal.

It is no surprise that there is unionist opposition to that. But then, having flip-flopped on whether to fight this election, and suggested that his principal loyalty was to an erratic US ex president who was hardly a notable friend of the UK when in office, Mr Farage cruelly tears up the deal his party did with the TUV. If he disliked it he could have realised it was too late to scrap the arrangement and instead said little.

On a day when BBCNI online all morning had the headline that FG and FF were ahead in the south, rather than leading on the SF flop, Mr Farage pushed that humiliation even further down, his betrayal of the TUV deal becoming top story for all us media. It is a pity this happened too late for the TUV to cut its links and fight the election on its own record.